In our latest series, HI is talking with media makers, highlighting their projects, learning what inspires them, and showing the kind of change and impact they hope to produce.

Filmmakers Olivier Lambert and Thomas Salva are tying together past and present in their upcoming film, Chasing Bonnie and Clyde, to discuss the failures of and alternatives to the American prison system. Lambert and Salva accomplish this by juxtaposing stories and testimonials about the Second Chance programs in Texas, a state that has instituted a radical and successful ‘Smart on Crime’ approach to combat recidivism among youths in prison, with the story of Bonnie and Clyde and how past attitude towards incarceration factored into their criminal behavior. Bonnie and Clyde’s story became even more poignant to Lambert and Salva as they drew parallels between the social and economic climate that influenced them and the one we are currently dealing with in the wake of the most recent recession.

In our latest series, HI is talking with media makers, highlighting their projects, learning what inspires them, and showing the kind of change and impact they hope to produce.

Production company Show of Force certainly lives up to its name. Creating socially engaged documentaries, television series, and transmedia projects, and utilizing new technologies and platforms to help deliver messages and entertain their audiences, Show of Force has been able to change the lives of thousands of people globally through engaging and entertaining media content. Founded in 2006 by Maro Chermayeff and Jeff Dupre, Show of Force has gone on to create award winning series and documentaries that span topics from human rights to the military to arts and culture in the United States.

The news landscape is changing. For Andy Carvin of First Look Media, this landscape will not unfold on paper and televisions in headlines and reports, but on computer screens and smart phones in tweets, status updates, and comments. As part of First Look, Carvin is launching Reported.ly, a new initiative designed to utilize social media updates and conversations to provide real-time reporting, fact checking, and conversations about global events and situations as they unfold. Reported.ly is looking to be the forefront for accurate and timely news stories by being a proponent of new technologies and platforms. HI is very interested in seeing how this initiative will fuse impact with journalism; will the kind of journalistic practice advocated by Reported.ly drive better stories that ultimately drive change? Will Reported.ly prove itself as an accurate and diverse news outlet?

Along with HI’s own research and development of different tools to aid media producers study impact and the ways media interacts with the social landscape, we are also excited to speak with those working in the media fields. In our new series, HI will be talking with media makers, highlighting their projects, learning what inspires them, and showing the kind of change and impact they hope to produce.

As we observed in a 2012 blog post, the last 14+ years have seen a substantial rise in the number of documentaries produced, particularly documentaries that focus on social issues.

Given this trend, we wondered: what issues or topics are most prominent among filmmakers working in the field? Does coverage of a specific issue ebb and flow over time? What can we learn from looking at the field in aggregate?

We turned to the growing database that will fuel StoryPilot to find out. (At the time of writing, the collection includes detail on 433 social impact documentaries released between 2000 and 2014.)

This post kicks off a series in which we’ll share some of our early findings about the social issue documentary landscape, in order to put data about documentaries and social issues into the hands of storytellers. Our goal is to help everyone find meaning in the data, and shed light onto the intersection of film, social issue campaigns, and society.

As we observed in a 2012 blog post, the last 14+ years have seen a substantial rise in the number of[...]

About Harmony Institute

The Harmony Institute (HI) is a research center dedicated to revealing the influence of entertainment. HI believes that mainstream media, combined with the power of strong storytelling, can be instrumental in producing lasting social change.